Dwoskin and Warhol at the Factory (Courtesy Stephen
Dwoskin)
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Stephen John Dwoskin, director, filmmaker, cinematographer,
artist and designer,
born 15 January1939, died 28 June 2012.
by Rozemin
Keshvani/ Veronique Goel
4th August 2012
The groundbreaking director,
cinematographer and filmmaker Stephen Dwoskin died suddenly on the
morning of Thursday 28th June at age 73. Originally from New York,
Stephen settled in London after being awarded a Fulbright Fellowship
for design research in the UK in 1964. Studying art under Professors
Willem de Kooning and Josef Albers at New York University, he later
took up design at the Parsons School of Design. While working as a
painter and designer in New York, Stephen became close friends with his
agent, the documentary filmmaker Emile de Antonio who introduced him to
the bohemian Greenwich Village scene where he mixed with the likes of
Andy Warhol, Allen Ginsberg, and Robert Frank. Dwoskin discovered
experimental cinema watching Maya Deren’s films and was influenced by
the transgressive underground films of Jack Smith and Ron Rice.
Stephen’s reputation as a graphic designer was already well established
in the United States through his innovative covers for Industrial
Design and Interiors. As early as 1961, he received the American
Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) award for designing one of the ten
best magazines to emerge in the United States in fifty years. That same
year, he was also recognised with the AIGA Award for book cover design.
His true love however was film, a medium through which he would expose
both his performers and viewers, by his powerful exploitation of the
interface between the immediacy of filming, the performer’s increasing
self-disclosure over time, and the viewer’s own desire to look. His
first films, Asleep and American Dream, he made with a simple Bolex
camera while working as Art Director with CBS Records in 1961.
Once settled in London, Stephen sought out opportunities to meet local
filmmakers. He popped into the Charing Cross bookshop, Better Books,
where he met poet Bob Cobbing and filmmaker Simon Hartog with whom he
helped establish the London independent filmmaking scene. He quickly
became a leading figure, co-founding the London Filmmakers Cooperative
in October 1966 and coordinating a series of underground screenings of
films for the first Notting Hill Film Festival at the request of John
(Hoppy) Hopkins. Living in Notting Hill throughout the 1960s, he became
familiarwith numerous poets, writers, filmmakers and artists who formed
the underground scene.
Dwoskin was awarded the Solvay Prize at the 4th International
Experimental Film Festival, Knokke, Belgium (1967-68), for his 1964
films, Naissant and Soliloquy. During the 1970s, he began a series of
avant-garde feature films, which led to productions in Germany and
France as well as the UK, anda succession of festival presentations,
including The Directors’ Fortnight in Cannes. He later went onto
receive the prestigious L’Age D’or (Bunuel) prize in 1982 for his
comedic self-examination
Outside In
(1981).Dwoskin began to develop his distinctive style in
early films such as Chinese Checkers
(1964), Trixi(1969)
and Dyn Amo
(1972), by initiating a triadic dynamic between the camera, performer
and viewer through which the performers return the gaze of both viewer
and filmmaker. His subtle deconstruction of the conventional system of
the gaze disturbs and defies viewers to reflect upon their own habits
of ‘looking’. The viewer becomes transfixed by Dwoskin’s unique
perspective of looking, his slow-moving camera, his intense scrutiny of
his subject and textured images, and his ethereal soundtracks. It was
conversations with Dwoksin that led Laura Mulvey, his neighbour and
friend in Notting Hill, to produce her celebrated essay on the ‘gaze’,
‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ in 1973.
Indeed, Dwoskin encouraged performers to engage with the camera to
create a process of self-discovery between himself and the performer,
as in Central Bazaar (1976),
or to near-dramatic narratives, as in The
SilentCry (1977) and Tod und Teufel (1973), Dwoskin’s
brilliant
adaptation of Frank Wedekind’s play). Dwoskin’s camera is fearless,
both in examining the desire to look and be looked upon, and in
pursuing a depth of intimacy which is often disturbing. In 1974,
Dwoskin turned the camera on himself to make the emotionally intense
Behindert in which he uses his own body, which was left disabled by his
childhood struggle with polio, to explore his relationship with an
able-bodied woman, a practice he continued to develop in films such as
Intoxicated by My Illness
(2001), and his more recent masterpiece, The
Sun and the Moon (2007). His 1994 film, Trying to Kiss the Moon,
an
autobiographical film-poem, presents home movie footage of his
childhood in the United States prior to contracting polio, while Face
of Our Fear (1992) and Pain Is (1997) reflect upon, indeed unmask, our
fear of ‘difference’, while opening our eyes to the humanity of those
who are perceived as ‘different’, ‘monstrous’ or somehow less
significant, whether it be the result of age, disability or illness.
A respected teacher of both design and film, Stephen has taught at the
Royal College of Art and the London College of Printing. He is author
of the 1975 book Film Is, a comprehensive personal account of the
International Free Cinema, and the 1993 photo-collage essay, Ha Ha! (La
Solution Imaginaire). Dwoskin’s work has been the subject of major film
retrospectives in over fourteen cities, including New York, London and
Geneva, with two recent retrospectives taking place at the British Film
Institute in 2009 and the Arsenal in Berlin in 2010. His complete
oeuvre consists in more than fifty films, plus a wealth of paintings,
photo-collages, drawings and designs.
Dwoskin’s 1968 film Take Me is currently on show until 29 July at the
exhibition Better Books: Art Anarchy and Apostasy
at Flat Time House
gallery in Peckham, while Alone
(1963) will be screened at South
London
Gallery on 25th July.
His newest and final film, Age Is… (2012) is to receive its world
premiere during the Locarno International Film Festival to be held from
1-11 August.
Stephen John Dwoskin, director, filmmaker, cinematographer, artist and
designer, born 15 January1939, died 28 June 2012.
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